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Artemia have featured on this blog before, mostly as possible food for Marmorkrebs. But like Marmorkrebs, there are parthenogenetic Artemia that reproduce asexually.

Mostly.

Maccari and colleagues show that Artemia sometimes produce little baby boy Artemia. There’re at low numbers; about 1% of offspring. I am impressed by just how many Artemia they looked at to determine this:

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Given how often we can’t find our car in a parking lot, it’s no wonder that the wayfinding abilities of animals impress and amaze us. We’ve all heard the stories of pets that find their way back to their homes, how salmon find their way back to the particular they were hatched in years after roaming around in the open oceans, and how pigeons can find their roost, even when taken to places that they have never been before.

A new paper adds another animal to the list of pathfinders, and i........ Read more »

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Queen Victoria, by most accounts, did not enjoy sex. And yet, she had nine children. It’s a reminder that pleasure and procreation may not be closely correlated.

Yet there is an hypothesis that is (dare I say) seductive in its simplicity. Orgasms make sex feel nice for women, causing women to have more sex, and therefore more babies. Therefore, female orgasms provide a fitness advantage, and are adaptive.

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If you’re hurt, a physician doesn’t give you an IQ test to figure out how painkiller to prescribe. (“Oh, you knew the meaning of ‘lugubrious’ and solved this trigonometry question? Take another aspirin for that sprain before you go to bed.”) But this is sometimes the approach to determine if we should be worried about caring for animals like this:

This is a squid (Doryteuthis pealeii, formerly known as Loligo pealeii). It’s a cephalopod, related to cuttlefish and octopuses. An........ Read more »

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We now return to our regular features, “Let’s impugn all the bloggers.” Let’s start with Geoffrey North, using a pulpit of Current Biology.

But there is also, I think, a danger here, which lies in the very speed of response, and the way that blogs are essentially “vanity publications” which lack the constraints of more conventional publishing — they are not reviewed, and do not even have to pass the critical eye of any editor.

North is not alone. Fred Schram, the Journal of Cru........ Read more »

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This appeared earlier today on the Facebook feed I Fucking Love Science:

Argh!

I remember seeing a shark documentary as a kid, hosted by Burgess Meredith, if I remember correctly. It made the same basic claim about great white sharks: too big to have predators, nobody had ever seen them die except by accident or by human hands, blah blah blah, therefore “some have suggested” they are immortal.

That I can remember the end of the show all these years later shows you what a terrific close........ Read more »

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When animals live caves full time, their descendents often lose their eyes. It has happened over and over and over and over again, in all different kinds of animals. But how this happens is not obvious. Stephen Jay Gould wrote that some people would use cave fish as an argument that “Lamarck must have been on to something” with his idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited. Well, no, that’s not that case, but it is a good example of how tricky thinking about losses can be.

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I have vague memories of the first time I counted to a hundred. It felt like one of those landmarks like tying your shoes for yourself the first time, or riding the bicycle more than a few feet without the training wheels or dad holding you up.

Of course, I don't come anywhere near Adam Spencer:

Once when I was about 7, I counted to 10,000 just to check the numbers didn't run out before then #NerdConfessions
Counting large numbers is not something that comes easily for us humans. A new paper c........ Read more »

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You probably think your friends feel more or less fatigued depending on whether they are dark skinned or fair skinned (like myself).

We know that differences in colour are important lots of other species besides humans. They can play a big part in an animal’s ability to blend into the surrounding environment, for instance. What might be less appreciated is that being a certain colour might take energy. After all, many colours in animals are........ Read more »

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This unassuming moth is a greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella). Don’t let its drab appearance fool you, friends. This is a record-setting animal, with one of the most extreme sensory systems yet found. Its speciality? Hearing.

When you listen to anything, there are two main properties inherent in the sound: loudness and tone. The volume is determined by the size of sound waves; the tone is set by the frequency of sound waves. Humans hear t........ Read more »

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There’s been a lot of talk about “paleo diets”, but here we have the real deal. A meal caught in the middle of digestion in a dinosaur.

Microraptor gui was introduced back in 2003, and immediately attracted attention because of the its feathers, particularly lots of long, prominent feathers on its hind legs, so unlike any bird or other flying beast we know of. There is good evidence (though disputed) that it was a glossy, black animal, rather like the grackles that hang around my campus.
........ Read more »

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Last week, the science news world was all a-flutter about a new technique to clear brains described in the paper, “Structural and molecular interrogation of intact biological systems.” (Argh, what a title. Would you have guessed what they did from that title?)

We in the invertebrate neuroscience community have been clearing brains for decades. Here are some examples from my own work.

Assembled in the dying days of straight edges and Letraset and photographing photographs, here are leg moto........ Read more »

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Eyes are good things to have in the light. But if you lived in the dark... all the time... would those eyes become so much a nuisance that you might lose them?

Animals that live in caves are often blind. People sometimes mistake this as evidence that features can be lost just by a “Use it or lose it” rule. That would be an example of inheriting an acquired character, which doesn’t happen in evolution. Instead, the typical explanation is that because there is no advantage to maintaining ey........ Read more »

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As I’ve mentioned before, scientists are so conservative that when you see an adjective like “extraordinary” in the title, you should at least open up the paper if you can and have a peek.

I came across a paper titled, “An extraordinary tail – integrative review of the agamid genus Xenagama” in Google Reader *. I was a bit curious (and miffed) because I had no idea from the title what kind of organism this paper would be about. All kinds of animals have tails.

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They’re tall. And I use the word precisely. They’re not just big; their legs are about half again as long as you’d predict based on their mass and bodies of other mammals.

Being tall has distinct consequences for the nervous system. The distances that signals have to travel might mean there is lots of lag between something happening out in the world, the signal getting to the brain, and the appropriate response going all the way back down to the muscles the........ Read more »

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A while ago, there were some reports of young men at universities who came up with an interesting way of imbibing alcohol. It was nicknamed “buttchugging.”

Yeah.

This method of alcohol delivery is, from a certain very twisted point of view, quite clever. The gut is a tube. This means that regardless of which orifice alcohol enters your gut,you can still uptake the alcohol into your system and enjoy the intoxicating effects.

Now, a new paper from Jaeckle and Strathmann looks whether sea ........ Read more »

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That’s because this is a picture of a blue whale, the largest animal to live on this planet. Ever.

Goodness knows, people try to show you the size. They put up mounts of blue whale skeletons in museums, or life sized models. There’s a very cool online animation that shows images from the blue whale full sized, on your computer screen, as has it drift by lazily. But I suspect that even these clever things do the trick of conveying what ........ Read more »

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